As a datacenter' s virtual infrastructure grows in size and encompasses more and more objects, for example, hardware and virtual machines, the ability to monitor the health of the objects in the virtual infrastructure becomes more and more difficult. Monitoring each object individually, as is typically done today, is no longer a viable option. In addition, existing monitoring solutions, are not scalable, and are difficult to interpret quickly.
Existing monitoring solutions provide dashboards comprised of lengthy lists of “Top” items, much like a financial stock listing. To use the lists, a user must identify a number of items to follow, or identify a value type of interest, and continually scan a flat list to try to understanding what is occurring. While this method may be useful for a small environment or a small list of items, it may quickly encounter a scalability issue. This is because the many lists displayed are often difficult to read at a glance. Instead, they require the user to scan and read each line, and even to scroll the page. Worse still, items that are continually in the top of a list no longer demand attention the next time a user looks at the list.